The Heart Is Not a Size by Beth Kephart Page B

was throwing a reception in the lobby bordered by admin and the cafeteria. I’d driven with her and her mother, worn a sorry shade of peach—a dress that I had bought too small, hoping it would fit me. By the time we’d arrived, the lobby was packed and Riley’s watercolors were already strung up on movable boards. She’d given crazy titles to each one—random mind bursts, she’d confided to me the day before, when she was telling me what to expect at the show. “The titles just occurred,” she said, titles such as “Believe Me I Tell You” and “What Are Mirrors For?”. I knew that they meant more than that. I knew, but I didn’t insist that she come right out and say it, because that was back then, when I left her boundaries sacred. When I chose friendship over truth.
    In the lobby, the art teachers had gathered and the principal, too, and there were kids we ate lunch with, kids from Riley’s art class, a couple of Mrs. Marksmen’s friends. Somebody started clapping, and then other people did, and soon the crowd divided in regular Red Sea fashion so that Riley could pass through and stand in the space between the principal and her teachers. She was to be commended, it was said. She had set a new art standard.
    “Riley Marksmen has graced Rennert High with her talent,” the principal declared, and I will neverforget the expression on my best friend’s face when she looked toward her mom. It was as if none of the rest of us mattered that night, as if none of the rest of us had come. The point for Riley was that Mrs. Marksmen see that her only daughter was growing up to be someone.
    What was I going to see of Riley going forward? How much of her would ever let me back in? I lay in that dark, and the sadness grew wings and the wings were a thrashing and the thrashing was my heart. Panic’s a bully. It hunkered heavy on my lungs. I sucked in air and I spat out that hot air. I pressed the hand I could lift to my chest.
    So what if panic attacks are a body’s defense—the afterbirth of the fight-or-flight response that is wired into our brains? So what? Explanations mean squat. Something ignites, adrenaline flows, a body succumbs, I was desperate. Alone in a room of girls, alone and dying. Waiting for the panic to finish with itself. To fly back into the cage from which it had come.
    Apply your intelligence to every living thing. That night I couldn’t think of anything but this: Riley had beenmy one best friend since I was five. And now she lay above me. Silent.
    Because of something I’d said.
    Because of my loving too much.
    Because I’d been a coward for way too long, and I’d let it come to this.

five
    I t was on the second day that the children came. The sun was high, and Mr. Thom had sent four of us to the top of the hill with the hope, he’d said, that we’d report back with some news. Four of us—me, Sophie, Drake, and Riley—randomly chosen, or maybe not so randomly; I couldn’t tell. But I had my camera, and I was using it as a shield, even as it let the strange world in. The white avenues of sand. The pallet houses. The doll that was still sacrificed to the sun. A pack of dogs was yipping through the streets, the dogs’ shoulders down and their noses to the ground, as if on the huntfor a bone greased with meat. The brain inside my skull was char. Not one of us was talking.
    Maybe we’d been watched the day before and branded friendly. Maybe the heat wasn’t as harsh as it had been. I can’t explain it. But it is true, what I told you before: That day the children came running. I can’t tell you who dared first—which door opened, then shut, leaving the house less crowded. What I know is that it was probably the loveliest thing that could have happened to me at the worst time of my life. It was color like sky—pinks, blues, and yellows. Color bright and clean in a desert place. In my camera’s eye. In my head.
    “This is so wild ,” Sophie said; and Drake just hovered; and Riley